Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COSMOS (DevOps for Complex Cyber-physical Systems)
Período documentado: 2021-01-01 hasta 2022-06-30
MOTIVATION
Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) – from robotics to transportation to medical devices – will play a crucial role in the quality of life of European citizens and the future of the European economy. One specific example is the public transport system where the percentage of fully automated operation is expected to increase from today’s 30% to 70% by 2030: CPS is a key enabler in this and many other industrial and societal evolutions. Increasing automation to such an extent, however, gives rise to many challenges, at the crux of which lies the hardware and software symbiosis. Several new challenges arise from the increasing complexity of CPS software, seamless connectivity, abundant compute power, and hardware heterogeneity. Emerging CPS are characterised by an evolving development that never ends, and engineering practitioners in the field are facing fundamental development challenges: observability, testability and predictability of the behaviour of emerging CPS is highly limited and, unfortunately, their usage in the real world can lead to accidents, sometimes tragically also involving humans. DevOps practices and tools are potentially the right solution to this problem, but they have not been developed to be applied in CPS domains. COSMOS takes on these challenges by delivering the technological and methodological advances necessary to enable DevOps for development of complex, trustworthy and reliable CPS solutions.
CHALLENGE
A key challenge in applying DevOps practices to CPS domains is that it requires specific development and verification strategies able to include Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) capabilities. Also, embedded systems design, manufacturing, and testing have different, longer lead times and cycle times than enterprise software, leading to longer V&V procedures and higher testing costs (typically over 25% of total development costs). Therefore, CPS are far more difficult to integrate, and testing the hardware is not always practically possible: the final version of the hardware is often available late and testing on the hardware directly can be expensive. A typical approach to dealing with this is to develop hardware proxies, such as prior system hardware versions/simulators and digital twins. However, this approach is flawed and is not sufficient to operate a V&V process that provides high levels of verifiability, trustworthiness, and confidence in the CPS behaviours.
OBJECTIVES
COSMOS will overcome the challenges of developing and evolving high-quality, dependable CPS by employing two key technologies: DevOps and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The collaborative project will:
a) Design, develop, and validate solutions that continuously improve the overall efficiency/quality of CPS, reducing the number of post-release defects and security vulnerabilities.
b) Develop solutions that enable CPS to autonomously adapt to unexpected run-time behaviours due, for example, to unexpected operating contexts.
c) Investigate the extent to which DevOps concepts can be applied in CPS domains over a diversified set of complex industrial case studies.
Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) – from robotics to transportation to medical devices – will play a crucial role in the quality of life of European citizens and the future of the European economy. One specific example is the public transport system where the percentage of fully automated operation is expected to increase from today’s 30% to 70% by 2030: CPS is a key enabler in this and many other industrial and societal evolutions. Increasing automation to such an extent, however, gives rise to many challenges, at the crux of which lies the hardware and software symbiosis. Several new challenges arise from the increasing complexity of CPS software, seamless connectivity, abundant compute power, and hardware heterogeneity. Emerging CPS are characterised by an evolving development that never ends, and engineering practitioners in the field are facing fundamental development challenges: observability, testability and predictability of the behaviour of emerging CPS is highly limited and, unfortunately, their usage in the real world can lead to accidents, sometimes tragically also involving humans. DevOps practices and tools are potentially the right solution to this problem, but they have not been developed to be applied in CPS domains. COSMOS takes on these challenges by delivering the technological and methodological advances necessary to enable DevOps for development of complex, trustworthy and reliable CPS solutions.
CHALLENGE
A key challenge in applying DevOps practices to CPS domains is that it requires specific development and verification strategies able to include Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) capabilities. Also, embedded systems design, manufacturing, and testing have different, longer lead times and cycle times than enterprise software, leading to longer V&V procedures and higher testing costs (typically over 25% of total development costs). Therefore, CPS are far more difficult to integrate, and testing the hardware is not always practically possible: the final version of the hardware is often available late and testing on the hardware directly can be expensive. A typical approach to dealing with this is to develop hardware proxies, such as prior system hardware versions/simulators and digital twins. However, this approach is flawed and is not sufficient to operate a V&V process that provides high levels of verifiability, trustworthiness, and confidence in the CPS behaviours.
OBJECTIVES
COSMOS will overcome the challenges of developing and evolving high-quality, dependable CPS by employing two key technologies: DevOps and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The collaborative project will:
a) Design, develop, and validate solutions that continuously improve the overall efficiency/quality of CPS, reducing the number of post-release defects and security vulnerabilities.
b) Develop solutions that enable CPS to autonomously adapt to unexpected run-time behaviours due, for example, to unexpected operating contexts.
c) Investigate the extent to which DevOps concepts can be applied in CPS domains over a diversified set of complex industrial case studies.
During the first months of the reporting period the focus was on the definition of the industrial Use Cases and the prioritisation of the associated requirements for the tools and technologies to support DevOps for CPS. The Use Case requirements have been used to establish the detailed technical requirements that are driving the technology development and innovation tasks within the project. A specification of the COSMOS system architecture has been developed considering the project technologies from different viewpoints.
During the later months of the first reporting period, development of the first prototype tools addressing DevOps for CPS capabilities was completed including a toolset supporting automated testing in co-simulated environments, a toolset for code analysis of CPS, a toolset for specification-based functional security testing of CPS, a tool for handling CPS change & behavioural models in CI/CD pipelines for CPS, an automated bad practice detector for CPS DevOps pipelines, and also a tool for quality assessment and monitoring of CPS in the field. Guidance for access and deployment by the industrial Use Case partners for evaluations and feedback has been provided in an interim version of the integrated platform.
Dissemination materials have been prepared introducing the project and the project website was brought online early in the project with updates provided as dissemination actions were taken and papers published. The project has also been active with social media providing regular tweets on Twitter. The partners have been active in dissemination actions including multiple technical papers and articles presented and published, multiple hosting of workshops targeting the CPS research and development community, and industrial presentations, all of which have created awareness of the forthcoming DevOps for CPS solution from COSMOS.
During the later months of the first reporting period, development of the first prototype tools addressing DevOps for CPS capabilities was completed including a toolset supporting automated testing in co-simulated environments, a toolset for code analysis of CPS, a toolset for specification-based functional security testing of CPS, a tool for handling CPS change & behavioural models in CI/CD pipelines for CPS, an automated bad practice detector for CPS DevOps pipelines, and also a tool for quality assessment and monitoring of CPS in the field. Guidance for access and deployment by the industrial Use Case partners for evaluations and feedback has been provided in an interim version of the integrated platform.
Dissemination materials have been prepared introducing the project and the project website was brought online early in the project with updates provided as dissemination actions were taken and papers published. The project has also been active with social media providing regular tweets on Twitter. The partners have been active in dissemination actions including multiple technical papers and articles presented and published, multiple hosting of workshops targeting the CPS research and development community, and industrial presentations, all of which have created awareness of the forthcoming DevOps for CPS solution from COSMOS.
COSMOS will provide software developers with methodological guidelines aimed at: (i) mitigating barriers when adopting CI/CD in the context of CPS, and (ii) methodological and automated support to help DevOps cope with bad practices. In particular, COSMOS will be able to identify misuses (e.g. poor configuration) of the pipeline, and to automatically recommend appropriate solutions. COSMOS will make generous use of software-defined infrastructures to allocate the resources necessary to fulfil industrial testing needs. More specifically, the developed pipelines will make use of software-defined infrastructures of Cloud platforms as necessary to run complex test processes, dynamically scaling infrastructure resources as needed using optimisation mechanisms to minimize overall testing time and costs, whilst ensuring tests are performed in a timely manner.
Key technology challenges that will be addressed in applying DevOps for CPS include:
a) Simulation and Hardware in-the-Loop (HiL)
b) Representative inputs from signals originating from heterogeneous sensors
c) Run-time verification from distributed logs, data and event streams
d) Security assessment of CPS vulnerabilities
e) Monitoring and self-adaptability of CPS
f) Evolving CPS for faster DevOps cycles
The key industrial impacts targeted by the COSMOS project technologies and innovations are:
i) Reduction the human effort and costs pertaining to the development, verification, validation, and evolution activities of CPS.
ii) Reduction in CPS fault-proneness to security threats, thus contributing to increased trustworthiness and dependability.
iii) Evolving CPS to be able to autonomously adapt (or react) to unexpected behaviour.
COSMOS innovations are driven by development and deployment requirements from five industrial partners providing CPS solutions to key European sectors of Healthcare, Avionics, Automotive, Utilities and Railways. The project will take specific actions to encourage and support the creation of a European ecosystem for exploiting DevOps for CPS, including open source distribution of project results and an open and transparent industry process for the evolution of the COSMOS DevOps technologies.
Key technology challenges that will be addressed in applying DevOps for CPS include:
a) Simulation and Hardware in-the-Loop (HiL)
b) Representative inputs from signals originating from heterogeneous sensors
c) Run-time verification from distributed logs, data and event streams
d) Security assessment of CPS vulnerabilities
e) Monitoring and self-adaptability of CPS
f) Evolving CPS for faster DevOps cycles
The key industrial impacts targeted by the COSMOS project technologies and innovations are:
i) Reduction the human effort and costs pertaining to the development, verification, validation, and evolution activities of CPS.
ii) Reduction in CPS fault-proneness to security threats, thus contributing to increased trustworthiness and dependability.
iii) Evolving CPS to be able to autonomously adapt (or react) to unexpected behaviour.
COSMOS innovations are driven by development and deployment requirements from five industrial partners providing CPS solutions to key European sectors of Healthcare, Avionics, Automotive, Utilities and Railways. The project will take specific actions to encourage and support the creation of a European ecosystem for exploiting DevOps for CPS, including open source distribution of project results and an open and transparent industry process for the evolution of the COSMOS DevOps technologies.